I really enjoy shifting gears manually. I also enjoy shifting gears manually without using the clutch. It absolutely blows the minds of pre-teen grandchildren. A car that will forever stand at the top of my Automotive Pantheon is a Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France. It belonged to a friend named Bill Pearce who was in the automotive film business, doing training films, promotional films, and the occasional commercial. Bill asked if I’d like to drive the TdF for a weekend in 1960. One thing led to another and I drove that car more or less regularly for more than a year. It was crude and noisy and it had a triangular fake-ivory shift knob with an equally fake jewel in its center, and every hour spent driving it was a preview of heaven.

Now Ferrari has spoken sotto voce to trusted journalists and friends-of-the-firm that manual transmissions are declared obsolete and future Ferraris will all feature automatics. The Ferrari California will be their last car with a clutch and a shift lever. There is something wrong with this picture. Could it be that as Ferrari has worked harder and harder to produce two-passenger parade floats for fat-ass fop non-enthusiasts, the percentage of greaseballs in that target market who actually know how to shift gears has slipped below acceptable levels?